Presentation of concepts relating to music has typically relied on traditional sheet music and textbooks printed on paper. These traditional techniques have recently been replaced by means of information technology, such as teaching programs running on computers.
The traditional paper-based sheet music and textbooks are handicapped by a certain lack of visual clarity. For instance, students commencing their studies of music find it difficult to grasp, based on musical staff notation, the fact that all major scales consist of equally sized steps or intervals, and the mutual differences among the major scales is limited to the tone that begins the scale. The same holds for all mutually similar scales, such as minor scales.
Computer programs make it easy to produce sounds corresponding to notes, and thus to illustrate the mutual similarity among the different scales, ie, the fact that the sole difference between any two scales is in the tonal height, and that all major scales or all minor scales comprise identical series of intervals. On the other hand, computer programs, suffer form certain problems relating to teaching, such as the problem that the act of producing a sound by a computer does not teach the student to produce the sound in questions themselves. In other words, a computer program does not necessarily improve the student's motoric memory. In addition, it is frequently difficult to place a computer physically on a music stand, or anywhere else in the natural field of vision of the player.